YC is hiring Product Engineers to build the future of YC -- and increasingly, software for startups everywhere.
We're a team of ~20 engineers building everything from Work at a Startup and Demo Day to investor software, founder tools, AI systems, and new open source projects. We don't have PMs. Engineers talk to users, decide what to build, and ship quickly.
Some of what we've been building:
* New products: GStack rethinks the software stack for an AI-native world. GBrain explores persistent memory and knowledge systems for AI. Paxel and other AI-powered products help founders—and increasingly everyone else -- build software and companies faster.
* Products at scale: We build and operate Work at a Startup (2M+ candidates, 1000s of early startups), Demo Day, our investor marketplace, SAFE signing, founder CRM, and the software that powers YC itself.
* Data: YC has over 20 years of proprietary startup data. We're applying it to how we think about the future of YC's batch, fundraising tools, hiring, recommendations, and entirely new ways to help people start and grow successful companies.
AI has fundamentally changed how we build software, and we're looking for engineers who are already experimenting with coding agents, MCP, LLMs, context engineering, evals, developer tooling, and whatever comes next. Our stack includes Rails, React, Postgres, Python, TypeScript, LLM APIs, and plenty of experimental infrastructure, but we're much more interested in great builders than expertise in any particular framework.
We're in person in San Francisco (Dogpatch). You'll work closely with founders and alongside people like Garry, Jared and Diana, helping define how YC—and startups more broadly—build software in the AI era.
We offer competitive compensation, carry in the YC fund, and a small, high-autonomy engineering team.
Y Combinator | Product Engineers on YC's own team | San Francisco | Full Time | $185K-$485K
I'm Ryan, an EM and engineer here at YC. We have a small, 18-person software team with no PMs -- engineers own everything end-to-end.
We build the software behind YC's $6B in investments: tools that help partners evaluate thousands of startups per batch, AI-powered apps that founders use every day, and platforms like Work at a Startup that connect candidates with YC companies. Engineers get unlimited AI tokens -- both for development and to build AI-powered products. What wouldn't you build to help founders + YC with that much firepower?
What makes this different from other roles:
* You'd learn more about startups here than you could possibly imagine. Every batch brings hundreds of founders building things across every industry, and you're right in the middle of it.
* We attend Demo Day, founder dinners, and work directly with partners and many of the companies. (They make great products!)
* We pay well, offer carry in the fund (like equity), and provide generous relocation support if you're not in SF yet.
Two roles open:
* Product Engineer -- full-stack, own the product lifecycle. Rails/React stack. Build tools that power how YC invests in and supports startups. It's a wide range, and sometimes it feels like labs-like work, other times it feels like a supersuit to power founders and our Partners like Garry and Jared.
* Community Builder and Software Engineer -- hybrid role. Run YC's talent-facing programs (meetups, tech talks, career expos) AND build the software that makes them scale. You need to be a great engineer and LOVE to build and support communities.
Checkout more about the roles, and email me directly if you're excited to learn more about startups than you will anywhere else - [email protected]
YC has been building ever-more ambitious software for founders to succeed -- since Garry returned. In the last year, our team delivered:
* Safe tools that has processed $1B+ in seed funding in last 4 batches
* Fundraising CRM for founders manage their fundraise -- used by all founders
* Work at a Startup has 1M+ candidates on it, with 1000s of hires/year
There are ton of ways we see YC Software benefitting our alumni and investors -- and we want founder/founding engineer minded people to drive each into standalone products.
Yet in reality, we're a team of 14 full-stack product engineers, the company is 85 people, and we intend to stay small and scrappy. I was the 7th engineer at salesforce and loved the early stage, and we get to be that way at YC... indefinitely.
YC is also knee-deep in applying AI tools and techniques across all of our product surface areas, and investor-focused work is no exception. We’re happy to share more when we chat in person.
We also want to work with people who love building full stack web apps. While our stack is Rails, React and Postgres, mostly we’re just a bunch of pragmatic builders who are excited about shipping and having impact.
Two roles are posted below: Investor Software and Post Batch (all SW after the batch).
If you're interested, read more below and email me directy with what you'd be excited to build here: [email protected].
My name is Ryan and I’m an Engineer & EM here on Y Combinator’s software team. I’ve helped us hire 8 of our amazing teammates, and – spoiler alert! – we’re hiring for three more full stack software engineers.
Why would you want to work at YC? Well, the short of it is that you’d get unprecedented insight into how companies are started – with access to all the talks, constantly being around founders, and working directly with YC Group Partners. Our GPs are possibly the 12 most knowledgeable people in the world about starting companies. You’d be hard pressed to work here and NOT learn something new about startups every day – which might be helpful if you’re interested in starting a company yourself.
Software also touches everything YC does. When I went through YC in 2013, the core pieces of the YC batch were a dinner each week, a 1-1 with your group partner, and an end-of-batch Demo Day event to raise money. Today, YC offers so many software tools to help founders build their companies, including:
- Demo Day website, which has helped founders raise $3B+ over the last 3 years
- Work at a Startup, where 1000s of companies have hired from a pool of 1M+ job seekers
- Bookface, a tool for YC founders to support and help each other build their companies
YC software runs kind of like a startup: we have a small engineering team (12 people) full of full-stack software developers (Rails, React, Postgres) who talk to our users, ship fast and iterate often. YC’s great for people who like to move fast and learn quickly. As a member of our team, you’d work with and learn from some pretty experienced people who were early at Facebook, Carta, Salesforce, Twilio and other top companies. Many of us have also been founders, and seven former employees have gone on to start startups that were funded by YC.
Building software at YC isn’t for everyone – YC’s real product is the Batch program and the Group Partners’ advice and help for the life of your startup. Our software team is often in the background, helping scale YC’s ability to help more companies, and in a way that means more 1-1 attention and support for each founder. What keeps me motivated is continuing to scale and improve YC through software, and getting to work with some of the most kind and talented people of my 20+ year career.
If you have questions, I would love to answer them here. (It would help me understand how I can make our role & work more clear!) And if this resonates with you, shoot me an email with what you’d most be excited to work on (job descriptions below) – [email protected]
My name is Ryan and I’m an Engineer & EM here on Y Combinator’s software team. I’ve helped us hire 8 of our amazing teammates, and – spoiler alert! – we’re hiring for three more full stack software engineers.
Why would you want to work at YC? Well, the short of it is that you’d get unprecedented insight into how companies are started – with access to all the talks, constantly being around founders, and working directly with YC Group Partners. Our GPs are possibly the 12 most knowledgeable people in the world about starting companies. You’d be hard pressed to work here and NOT learn something new about startups every day – which might be helpful if you’re interested in starting a company yourself.
Software also touches everything YC does. When I went through YC in 2013, the core pieces of the YC batch were a dinner each week, a 1-1 with your group partner, and an end-of-batch Demo Day event to raise money. Today, YC offers so many software tools to help founders build their companies, including:
- Demo Day website, which has helped founders raise $3B+ over the last 3 years
- Work at a Startup, where 1000s of companies have hired from a pool of 1M+ job seekers
- Bookface, a tool for YC founders to support and help each other build their companies
YC software runs kind of like a startup: we have a small engineering team (15 people) full of full-stack software developers (Rails, React, Postgres) who talk to our users, ship fast and iterate often. YC’s great for people who like to move fast and learn quickly. As a member of our team, you’d work with and learn from some pretty experienced people who were early at Facebook, Carta, Salesforce, Twilio and other top companies.
Many of us have also been founders, and seven former employees have gone on to start startups that were funded by YC. If you want to start a startup but don’t have a great idea yet, we welcome you to spend a couple years here to learn, and then launch your own. On the flip side, if you can see yourself writing code indefinitely, we’d love to keep you happy here at YC for a long time. Either one works for us.
Building software at YC isn’t for everyone – YC’s real product is the Batch program and the Group Partners’ advice and help for the life of your startup. Our software team is often in the background, helping scale YC’s ability to help more companies, and in a way that means more 1-1 attention and support for each founder. What keeps me motivated is continuing to scale and improve YC through software, and getting to work with some of the most kind and talented people of my 20+ year career.
If you have questions, I would love to answer them here. (It would help me understand how I can make our role & work more clear!) And if this resonates with you, shoot me an email with what you’d most be excited to work on (job descriptions below) – [email protected]
Why would you want to work at YC? Well, the short of it is that you’d get unprecedented insight into how companies are started – with access to all the talks, constantly being around founders, and working directly with YC Group Partners. Our GPs are possibly the 12 most knowledgeable people in the world about starting companies. You’d be hard pressed to work here and NOT learn something new about startups every day – which might be helpful if you’re interested in starting a company yourself.
Software also touches everything YC does. When I went through YC in 2013, the core pieces of the YC batch were a dinner each week, a 1-1 with your group partner, and an end-of-batch Demo Day event to raise money. Today, YC offers so many software tools to help founders build their companies, including:
Demo Day website, which has helped founders raise $3B+ over the last 3 years
Work at a Startup, where 1000s of companies have hired from a pool of 1M+ job seekers
Bookface, a tool for YC founders to support and help each other build their companies
YC software runs kind of like a startup: we have a small engineering team (15 people) full of full-stack software developers (Rails, React, Postgres) who talk to our users, ship fast and iterate often. YC’s great for people who like to move fast and learn quickly. As a member of our team, you’d work with and learn from some pretty experienced people who were early at Facebook, Carta, Salesforce, Twilio and other top companies.
Many of us have also been founders, and seven former employees have gone on to start startups that were funded by YC. If you want to start a startup but don’t have a great idea yet, we welcome you to spend a couple years here to learn, and then launch your own. On the flip side, if you can see yourself writing code indefinitely, we’d love to keep you happy here at YC for a long time. Either one works for us.
Building software at YC isn’t for everyone – YC’s real product is the Batch program and the Group Partners’ advice and help for the life of your startup. Our software team is often in the background, helping scale YC’s ability to help more companies, and in a way that means more 1-1 attention and support for each founder. What keeps me motivated is continuing to scale and improve YC through software, and getting to work with some of the most kind and talented people of my 20+ year career.
If you have questions, I would love to answer them here. (It would help me understand how I can make our role & work more clear!) And if this resonates with you, shoot me an email with what you’d most be excited to work on (job descriptions below) – [email protected]
We did see a lot of our YC startups stop/slow down hiring at that time and throughout the summer. It has picked up since, as a function of 1.) a new batch of YC startups graduating, 2.) raising a healthy seed round and 3.) hiring a few early employees.
OP told me his experience was more recent, and that's a big time gap between the memo and now. I can't speak to any specifics, but I do think all startups (and definitely YC ones) are continually re-evaluating their business position: revenue, projected growth and corresponding headcount. And with a pull-back in industry spending during a downturn (and more expected going into 2023), vendors/sellers/startups will all have to re-adjust their 2023 plans pretty quickly.
Poor fiscal planning isn't an excuse for what happened to OP. It does shed light on how some companies (including YC startups) are continually trying to adapt during this downturn.
Note: The above comments about industry spend isn't from anything in particular I'm seeing from our YC startups, but rather from having worked at B2B startups twice previously during downturns -- and personally being on both sides of the equation (as seller and buyer of SaaS software).
but in seriousness, i'm one of the people here trying to uplevel hiring at YC startups, and at startups more broadly.
this thread is helpful for me to know what we can do to make startup hiring (and working at a startup) better. i'm appreciative for the comments/voices here so i can keep learning.
I got a chance to connect with OP -- thank you again for your thoughtfulness and balance.
While I (and YC) am trying to help founders create postive interview experiences for candidates, there's clearly more work to be done. As I mentioned previously, I give hiring/interview training for our founders. From our conversation (and this broader thread), I need to reiterate/add points to my training around:
- More education to founders around who should/shouldn't be hiring. This market is (and will continue to be) tricky to navigate, but that's not an excuse for rescinding an offer. (We actually do a lot of training -- and our partners repeatedly tell our founders not to overhire, but we can do more here, especially now.)
- Paid trials are good. From my conversation with job seekers -- and with OP -- this is a good practice to respect an interviewee for their time, and more founders should do this.
- Keep trial periods short. 1-2 weeks is a good amount of time; any longer and you risk wasting the candidate's time, which a founder/hiring team should be respectful of, always.
Again, there's more to do, and I'll try to work more closely with our startups to really dig into their hiring plans for 2023. I don't want job seekers to be experiencing this kind of thing (on workatastartup.com or otherwise), so we'll do what we can within our network to prevent it.
Lots of good points here, on both sides of the hiring equation.
In a strong market, candidates have been able to shop around, get multiple offers (based on interest, comp, etc) and pick the best one for them. If for nothing else, it's useful to get multiple data points to understand the state of the market. Candidates should absolutely do this -- to make sure they're making the right decision based on the possible options out there.
We tell our founders that setting deadlines to accept an offer are not effective, especially given the above. It adds unnecessary stress to the situation, and it sets a bad tone for the relationship.
We also tell our founders to ask what timeline the candidate is looking at, and say when the company is hoping to make a decision. And if those don't align from the start, to note it upfront. (We also ask out founders to write one-pagers on their interview process, to communicate and set those expectations at the beginning of the process. That's fairly new, and taking some time to adopt, but we're working on it.)
Our hiring portal is a start, and we see lots of YC companies hire first employees/founding engineers on it. But any additional insights you have -- especially from the candidate's side -- is welcome. We'd love to get a better sense of what more we could do here.
Ryan here at YC. I help build YC’s workatastartup.com, and also work with companies to help them find great people for their teams. Part of that includes teaching them to hire well -- communicating clear expectations, having fair/reasonable questions, paying for the interviewee's time, and hiring when they’re in a good position to do so.
What you experienced sounds incredibly frustrating. Sorry that you went through that. I don’t know the details on the company side, and the market is obviously pretty bad. But that still shouldn’t be a catch-all excuse for you having a bad experience.
If you’re open to it, would love to connect live and learn more about what happened. And I’m also happy to make intros to founders/companies that might be a better fit -- especially ones that are in a strong economic position to do so.
My email is ryan AT ycombinator.com if you’d like to connect. Hope to hear from you, and help if I can.
Y Combinator Job Expo, June 6th 2022 | Engineering, Product, Design | Virtual
Y Combinator is hosting our Summer Job Expo online on Wednesday, June 8th, 4 pm PT. This is a way to meet the latest batch of founders from YC startups (W22 & S21) and learn about open roles in engineering, product and design.
We’ve vetted these startups to make sure they’re in a good position to hire -- in terms of funding, strong teams, and impactful products to work on. Some notable startups:
- Epsilon3: Former SpaceX and Google engineers building the OS for spacecraft & operations.
- Sieve: AI infrastructure & APIs for developers to process and understand visual data, from former Scale/NVIDA engineers.
- Kalshi: First-ever legal futures exchange for trading on anything from Lil Nas X to climate change.
- Kable: Former Hulu billing PM/engineer building a usage-based billing platform.
- AstroForge: Mining astroids.
The expo is an efficient way to meet a number of great startups all at once, and not have to seek them out yourself. We start the event with rapid pitches by founders -- like Demo Day, but for engineers instead of investors -- to help you quickly survey the companies. After the pitches, we open up a virtual expo hall to give you a chance to meet founders and early employees, learn more about the domain and technology, and hear about open roles.
Despite the uncertainty in the broader market, we're seeing a lot of early stage startups being well-capitalized, with $2-5M seed rounds. (Some startups in attendance have recently closed a significantly larger round, including Searchlight, Kalshi and Portal.) All startups are hiring selectively to make sure they have a long runway and impactful product roadmap. Almost all of the companies are hiring for US-remote, with a few are back in-person.
We've got room for about 40 startups to present. So if you have other industries or types of startups you’re excited about, let us know and we’ll do our best to find some and invite them to join us.
If you're open next week and want a fun, informative and efficient evening of learning about new tech and open roles, please join us:
If you're interested in learning more about startups, Y Combinator is hiring for a full-stack Product Engineer. Working at YC probably is one of the best ways to learn about startups. Everyone on the team gets to participate in the YC programming -- dinners, talks and more. You'll get a unique vantage point to learn about startups, and to write software that has helped companies like Airbnb, Stripe and Instacart exist.
We're a team of 10 full-stack product engineers and have a pretty broad range of experiences -- from bigger companies like FB and Google, as well as former YC founders ourselves. Our stack is pretty straightforward (Rails, React, Postgres), but the last three engineers have learned it on the job. True to YC advice, our product engineers talk to our customers regularly (in our case, it's mostly founders) and ship fast. We also define our own roadmap. You won't be building software to scale to millions of users, but you'll be talking 1-1 with lots of founders to build stuff they need to help build and grow their companies, and that's a different kind of reward.
In particular, we're hiring for the Admissions software team. This is an opportunity to help YC write software that selects companies for YC interviews and ultimately for our batch. We're hiring for both an IC and/or a tech lead who has done mentorship, code review and helped define systems previously. While no past experience in reading applications/building review software isn't necessary, an interest in learning more about startups (and possibly having worked at one) is a huge asset in this role.
Lastly, we pay competitively (both in salary and stock-like benefits), offer reasonable work-life balance, and we're fully remote at this point, with some center-of-gravity in SF and NY.
If working on YC's software team and helping great startups sounds interesting at all, please apply above OR email me at ryan AT ycombinator.com.
There's still a market for in-person jobs/workers, and people are willing to relocate as they did pre-pandemic. It might be significantly smaller, but if it matters enough on both sides to be in-person, I think it's a factor to consider when growing a team/picking a job.
While I don't have hard numbers, I know a few founders who are seed-stage and need to hire only 2-3 people; they want to be in an office (safely) in their early days. (Who knows what will happen as they grow.) Likewise, many job seekers I talk to want to be in-person and working alongside colleagues (safely) because they miss in-person interactions.
To your last point, I don't know if any angel investors in YC startups take into consideration a startups' willingness/unwillingness to be remote as a signal for whether they should invest. My guess is that there are better signals (technical founder, past experience, progress already made) that are more important deciding factors.
There are some startups I work with that are still hiring in-person only. And conversely, I've spoken with a number of candidates who are (not surprisingly) sick of remote work -- and open to relocating. That market still exists, and we'll see how it plays out in the next couple of years.
At workatastartup.com, you can filter by "Not remote" jobs, but it's probably not as intuitive as it could be. We need to revamp some of our search filters accordingly. But until we have it, feel free to email me (ryan AT ycombinator DOT com) and I'll do what I can to help you find ones that might be a good fit.
There are certainly companies looking for talent that is only time-zone friendly. Having run an engineering team co-located in SF & Beijing, I know how hard it is myself to be working odd hours for standups, product syncs, etc.
That said, there are other companies that are hiring truly global. I know OneSignal is one such YC startup, having hired somebody during the pandemic in the Netherlands.
Last year alone, YC startups hired across over 40 countries. I can dig into more data re: how many were US-based companies hiring abroad -- that's a good distinction.
YC has a small and mighty software team, and the work here has a kind of leveraged impact that you won't find elsewhere: instead of helping grow a single startup, you'll be building software that helps thousands of startups succeed.
We're a group of 10 engineers working on everything from YC's Admissions Software to Work at a Startup. Many of us are former founders who have a passion for startups. You'll learn a ton about how startups are built (all employees join the YC "dinners" and talks) and you'll use best practices from our team with deep experience from FB, Google, Twilio, Salesforce, and a myriad of other companies.
Our stack is pretty straightforward (Rails, React, Postgres), but the last three engineers have learned it on the job. True to YC advice, our product engineers talk to our customers pretty regularly (in our case, it's mostly founders) and ship fast. We also define our own roadmap. You won't be building software to scale to millions of users, but you'll be talking 1-1 with lots of founders to build stuff they need to help build and grow their companies, and that's a different kind of reward.
Lastly, we pay competitively (both in salary and stock-like benefits), offer reasonable work-life balance, and we're fully remote at this point.
If working on YC's software team and helping great startups sounds interesting at all, please email me at ryan AT ycombinator.com.
One application (takes about 15 minutes) will apply you to over 800 YC companies -- all vetted, well funded and ready to hire. You can also hide your app from specific YC companies, if you want.
YC founders (and some employees) will reach out to you directly about opportunities. You can also browse the directory and reach out directly yourself. See if there's one that fits your domain interest and risk profile. (Some startups on the platform have raised $10M+, have lots of runway, and are actively hiring for engineers.)
If you have questions about the site, want specific suggestions of companies to check out or could use a resume review, email me and I'm happy to help: [email protected].
Y Combinator | Software Engineer | Anywhere in US | Full-time
As YC has gone remote in the last year, our small-but-mighty software team has been busy building the OS that runs all of YC.
In the last six months alone, we've rewritten our entire Demo Day experience (to connect founders with potential investors), re-created the batch experience with both in-house tools and 3rd party integrations, and written software to help founders connect with one another for advice, intros, deals, networking and so much more.
We have a ton more to deliver, so we're looking to hire a product engineer to join our team. This is a great role for somebody who loves helping startups, is eager to talk with YC founders (our customers!), and wants to own projects from start-to-finish.
We work primarily in Ruby on Rails and React (learning on the job is fine though), and we spend most of our time coding. That said, we encourage everyone to participate in all of YC -- read applications, join our batch talks, help out with Demo Day and speak up on the projects you'd want to work on. (And if you’re looking for input, there are always group partners around).
The software team you'd be joining has seven people with lots of collective years of start-up and big company experience, so you'll get the best of both worlds: moving fast and shipping and strong teammates/mentors to help you learn. About half of us are alums and several of us are parents. We're open to people 2+ years out of school or even 10+ years of experience. Lastly, the work-life balance is great, and you get to work with people across the company.
If this sounds like an interesting opportunity, apply below and email ryan AT ycombinator.com
YC is hiring Product Engineers to build the future of YC -- and increasingly, software for startups everywhere.
We're a team of ~20 engineers building everything from Work at a Startup and Demo Day to investor software, founder tools, AI systems, and new open source projects. We don't have PMs. Engineers talk to users, decide what to build, and ship quickly.
Some of what we've been building:
* New products: GStack rethinks the software stack for an AI-native world. GBrain explores persistent memory and knowledge systems for AI. Paxel and other AI-powered products help founders—and increasingly everyone else -- build software and companies faster.
* Products at scale: We build and operate Work at a Startup (2M+ candidates, 1000s of early startups), Demo Day, our investor marketplace, SAFE signing, founder CRM, and the software that powers YC itself.
* Data: YC has over 20 years of proprietary startup data. We're applying it to how we think about the future of YC's batch, fundraising tools, hiring, recommendations, and entirely new ways to help people start and grow successful companies.
AI has fundamentally changed how we build software, and we're looking for engineers who are already experimenting with coding agents, MCP, LLMs, context engineering, evals, developer tooling, and whatever comes next. Our stack includes Rails, React, Postgres, Python, TypeScript, LLM APIs, and plenty of experimental infrastructure, but we're much more interested in great builders than expertise in any particular framework.
We're in person in San Francisco (Dogpatch). You'll work closely with founders and alongside people like Garry, Jared and Diana, helping define how YC—and startups more broadly—build software in the AI era.
We offer competitive compensation, carry in the YC fund, and a small, high-autonomy engineering team.
Learn more about the team and role at https://www.ycombinator.com/software. If this sounds exciting, I'd love to chat -- email me directly at [email protected].